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Vaniver comments on Less Wrong mentoring thread - Less Wrong
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I'm 17 and going to my final year of high school in January. I'm having some trouble making up my mind about what to do after high school and would appreciate some help with this.
I've skimmed a few books on career choice but they all just spout platitudes. I don't think I should do "What Interests Me" because I think I'd become bored of almost anything after a few weeks. I don't think I should do what I'm "talented" at because I doubt talents are specific enough to narrow down career-space enough. (Yes, a person might have high g and thus be good at computer programming, but that same high g would aid them as much with lots of other careers - why choose programming specifically?) Even if talents were specific enough, I don't think my self-assessments of what my talents are are even nearly accurate enough to base the next 50+ years of my life on them.
It's pretty obvious that most people have no idea what they're doing when they choose a career. So what should I base a career choice on?
Talk to your high school's guidance counselor. They should have a few aptitude tests that you might find useful (like this short one).
Think of a career as the way in which you provide value to others. The most important word in that sentence is 'you, then 'others'. Figuring out what your personality is and what your mental skills are is the best springboard. (And mental skills are way more than "g"- there's a lot of variation in mental architecture among people.)
I've taken tests like that in the past. They seem useful for narrowing things down, but what frustrates me is that they make recommendations based on things you shouldn't be using to make long-term recommendations. For instance, the test you linked to asks about level of interest in art, business, law, computers, etc.. I don't want to spend the next 50 years of my life in neuroscience because I happened to have a crush on biology in high-school.
I mentioned g because it's important for career choice and it seems unlikely to change much, unlike other things like social skills, programming skill, or self-control, which can be learned (and should be learned if some brief learning is needed for a long-term better career).